Appalachian Literature for Young Adults:
The Contributions of Rebecca Caudill

by Mary Warner

Rebecca Caudill, born in l899 in Poor Fork, now Cumberland,
Kentucky, lived until l985 and devoted a major portion of her life
to writing young adult and children's literature. With the
exception of
Wind, Sand and Sky,
a book of Haiku of the
Arizona desert, the remainder of Caudill's seventeen books are all
set in Appalachia, each portraying something of the life, the
milieu, and the richness of the mountain culture and its people.
During a lecture called, "The High Cost of Writing," given to
students and faculty of Southeast Community College in Cumberland,
Kentucky, Rebecca Caudill emphasized that "what life has said to an
individual is the only thing he has to write about that is worth
writing about" (12). Her life in and of Appalachia spoke
consistently to her of the joys and anguishes of the mountain
experience, and her four young adult novels comprehensively convey
many motifs "worth writing about." Caudill's
Tree of Freedom,
The Far-off
Land,
Barrie and Daughter,
and
Susan Cornish
capture four major
characteristics of Appalachian culture, each worth writing about
and each worth examining more thoroughly in the waning years of
Appalachian culture.

To clarify the point of Appalachian culture "waning," it is
significant to explain who makes up this culture. The Appalachian
people are those born in the region geographically covered by the
Appalachian mountains of Pennsylvania, Maryland, Ohio, Virginia,
West Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee,
Georgia and Alabama. This area contains several unique cultures and
communities, including the culture of the coal mining areas of the
central and southern Appalachians, the Eastern Band of the Cherokee
nation, and the last vestiges of the self-sufficient farm and
village culture of the southern Appalachian mountains. Between the
Civil War and World War II, the rolling hills and deep hollows of
the Appalachians sustained an unchanging civilization. This way of
life, however, was destroyed by the Industrial Revolution in other
parts of the nation. As the last living natives of the Appalachian
cultures, those born in the region prior to World War II pass away,
the true Appalachian cultures are in danger of being lost. Thus the
particular importance in revisiting the works of Rebecca
Caudill.

The four major characteristics of Appalachian cultures which
dominate Caudill's novels are the following. The first quality is
kindness, which encompasses tolerance of others and hospitality.
The second is a kind of freedom which implies independence,
self-confidence, and the pride that supports necessary and
authentic self-esteem. The third, specifically evident in her
strong female protagonists, is a moral code of integrity. The
fourth quality is the importance of education, the emphasis that
marked Caudill's heritage from her parents who were teachers and
was confirmed in her return to Appalachia later in her life.

Many of Caudill's novels are loosely autobiographical; her
memoir,
My Appalachia,
delineates the
positive and negative of mountain culture.

Most important were the people, unhurried, kind,
independent, determined, with big families and close and loyal
family ties. Money was of no importance in the life of anyone I
knew. If a man was sick, womenfolks helped nurse him to health,
while the menfolks tended to his planting, his plowing, his
harvesting. A man was judged by what he was, never by what he had.
Doors in the houses of my Appalachia were never locked against
friend or stranger. The people found their pleasures in the simple
things of life. They possessed a kind of profound wisdom,
characteristic of those who live close to Nature, who walk in step
with Nature's rhythm, and who depend on Nature for life itself.
(
My Appalachia
28 and 31, interim pages
are photographs)

This rich description arose from Caudill's early years in
Appalachia. As she moved away from the region for graduate work,
and eventually settled in Urbana, Illinois, Caudill did not
experience firsthand the early years of the coal mining
exploitation of her Appalachia nor many of the negatives which
affected Appalachian life. These problems included economic
difficulties, ignorance, and the lack of a sense of community,
according to Dr. W. D. Weatherford, who had lived most of his
ninety years in the mountains of North Carolina, who had been a
teacher, Methodist minister, Y.M.C.A. official, and vice-president
of Berea College, and whom Caudill interviewed in the l960's.

The realities Weatherford pointed out to Caudill have informed
her writings; she used her understanding of the area to become a
voice authentically portraying the mountain culture. This portrayal
of Appalachian cultures, marked specifically by kindness which
signals acceptance of others and hospitality towards them, freedom
which signals self-confidence and pride, a moral code of integrity,
and an emphasis on the importance of education, is a portrayal apt
to contemporary young adult readers who can meet in Caudill's
characters, authentic role models.

Tree of Freedom (1956)

Two of her four young adult novels are historical and
consistently highlight the characteristic of freedom.
Tree of Freedom
and
The
Far-Off Land
are set in the late 1700's and focus primarily
on the westward movement of Scots-Irish to Kentucky and beyond the
Appalachians.
Tree of Freedom,
which
begins in l780, chronicles the move of the Venable family, and the
many others seeking the rich, then unclaimed land in Kentucky. This
land rush creates one of the major conflicts in the novel: men
devoting their energies to the land rush instead of fighting with
the beleaguered troops of the Continental army. Noel Venable, the
fifteen-year-old, eldest son who is too steeped in his maternal
Tidewater heritage and idealism to be eager about his father's
persistent drive Westward, voices the concern about owning land
without the freedom of independence:

"Folks are too busy scandalizin' the Continental
Congress," he said. "They're all tryin' to get their hands on hard
Spanish money. They're grabbin' up Kentucky land while it's cheap,
but doin' precious little to keep it free. Folks are too blind,
Steffy, and too scared. They're a little hexed, a lot of 'em are.
And not one in a hundred of 'em, I reckon, has ever thought what
it'd be like if we win our chance. Or for that matter, if we lose
it."
(
Tree of Freedom 83
)

Noel, in the beginning of the novel, is the only one in the Venable
family who has learned how to read. Caudill's sense of the
importance of education is evident in Noel's and Stephanie's
treasuring of books and reading. Noel ultimately wins his father's
"approval" of books and reading when he uses his ability to read to
save his family from unscrupulous land swindlers.

Stephanie Venable, age l3, is the female protagonist of
Tree of Freedom.
She serves as the mediator
between her father and Noel, and consistently holds the family
together. She manifests each of Caudill's four characteristics. The
aspect of freedom is evident first in Stephanie's selection of the
item she'll take with her from the family's North Carolina home
into the wilderness.

In the smokehouse she broke the cobwebs that sealed a
warped old calabash. Reaching her fingers inside, she took one
solitary apple seed of the many Bertha [her mother] had saved, and
dropped in into the deerskin pouch that hung about her waist,
tracing in her mind as she did so the long, strange journey of the
apples through which the seed had come. Bertha's Back Country tree
had grown from seed she had saved from an apple that grew on
Grandmammy Linney's tree in Charleston. And Grandmammy Linney, when
she was thirteen-year-old Marguerite de Monchard, had brought her
seed from an apple that grew in the yard of her old home in France.
The Trees of St. Jean de Maurienne, they were called, for the
little French village from which Grandmammy came.
(
Tree of Freedom 25
)

In this novel, Caudill reveals the Appalachian culture against the
backdrop of freedom. She weaves several conflicts, again with
contemporary echoes: families against untamed wilderness; a father,
Jonathan Venable, against his torturous past that drives his
pragmatic, relentless pursuit of Kentucky farmland and
independence; the same father against his idealistic son; land
grabbers and swindlers against those like the Venables who have
planted corn on the land as part of their claim; frustrated
patriots against colonists disgruntled by the British dominance to
this point in the American Revolution; George Washington, George
Rogers Clark, Francis Marion and other leaders against the
unwilling colonists who continue to slump in their commitment to
liberty; and a cast of individual characters who face inner
conflicts.

A final significant theme from
Tree of
Freedom
highlights the cost of freedom. Stephanie
reiterates in her explanation to younger brother, Willie, that a
tree of freedom is one "that grows sometimes sweet apples,
sometimes bitter ones" (
Tree of
Freedom
91
). She learns as well that her efforts to secure
freedom do not have to entail physically joining the Revolutionary
War. Noel reminds her, "Servin' your country's mostly honest
work...And thinkin' ahead. You're doin' your share to found new
settlement in America, only you want to be on your guard like the
de Monchards, not to make any deal with slavery of any sort.
There's lots of slavery, Steffy, besides that you find in a black
skin" (
Tree of Freedom
142
).

The Far-Off Land (1964)

The Far-Off Land,
the second
historical novel, even more emphatically develops the moral
imperative of acceptance of all human beings, particularly of
Native Americans. This novel can be studied in tandem with Dorothy
Hoobler's
The Trail on Which They
Wept.
Figure One provides a guide for how Dorothy Hoobler's
novel, voicing a young Cherokee woman's experience during the Trail
of Tears, can be paired with Caudill's
The
Far-Off Land.

When
The Far-Off Land
opens, it's
l780. Ketturn Petrie, the novel's protagonist, has been raised for
eight years of her life by the Moravians, living in Salem, North
Carolina. Anson Petrie, Ketty's only living sibling, whom she has
not seen in over fourteen years, has discovered that his sister is
with the Moravians. Anson does not know that after he left his
North Carolina home in l764, following the allure of those
pioneering into Kentucky, his parents and five of his six siblings
died. As Ketty reveals the sad saga, she tells her brother how
their mother treated every person as one of her own children:

"You'd think, Anson, that when Mother had parted with
six of her children, five deep in their bury holes and one gone off
in silence, she'd have parted with her senses too. But it seems
like sorrow only tendered her heart till she looked on all people
as her children. (26)

Anson cannot believe that his mother would have treated "red men,
skulking thieving red men" as he describes them, with such
kindness, yet this very kindness proved to be the shield that
protected Ketty and her mother in every circumstance.

Ketty takes the Moravian trait of acceptance and sense of
hospitality for all on the pioneer journey. As Ketty prepares to
leave the Moravian community, Sister Oesterlein counsels Ketty to
"be present" and "be reverent" (35) in all dealings with others,
and once again Caudill establishes the motif of moral integrity and
hospitality toward others:

"By loving people, Ketty, you will come to understand
their needs. By loving and caring about people--all people. See
people as we Moravians see them--not as friends or enemies, but as
people, red people and black people as well as white, Tories as
well as patriots, the gentleman's slave as well as the gentleman.
If love goes with you through the wilderness, Ketty, you needn't be
afraid. There isn't any evil in the world that won't give ground
before a loving woman."
(
The Far-Off Land
35
)

This advice given by Sister Oesterlein underlies all of the
conflicts Ketty and her companion pioneers encounter. This novel is
filled with the tensions of Anglo settlers invading the lands and
lives of Native Americans; of the dangers of mountain travels,
untamed rivers fraught with shoals, sawyers, "the Suck" and "the
Boiling Pot"; of the overwhelming fears experienced by Farrer, the
young boy who witnessed his parents being scalped; and the fierce
persistence of Ketty to hold onto her ideals of treating all people
with kindness despite the relentless insistence of Anson that his
sister learn to shoot "red men." The "Far-Off Land" suggested by
the book's title symbolizes the universal of many different
searchings.

At the point when Ketty and Anson were reunited, she learned
that Anson was married and had two children; Ketty was particularly
troubled to learn, though, that Anson's wife and children could not
read. Feeling somewhat useless on the initial day of the river
journey into the wilderness, she decides to teach the six children
on board how to read. One of Ketty's major ways of "being present,"
fulfilling her admonition from Sister Oesterlein, is to teach,
entertain, and divert the children during their river route into
the wilderness.

The Petrie party is eventually joined by George Soelle, a
surveyor. Soelle lends the male voice of reason to the feverish
land-driven Anson and his two male counterparts, Baptist and
Shubeal. Soelle also serves as moral support for Ketty. In one
conversation following Anson and Baptist's braggadocio about an
early Indian raid, when they thought they'd successfully demolished
the Native American settlements along part of the river, Ketty
expresses her anguish, "Why won't white men listen to reason?"
(142) George's words again articulate the challenge of moral
integrity:

"Because they're land-greedy...They're always pushing
west, and in the same way. First one ventures out, a hunter or a
trapper. Then other hunters come. They like the lay of the land, so
they decide to fetch their families and settle. They cut down trees
that shelter the wild game, and plant corn. Their neighbors follow
and take up claims of their own. And nobody says by-your-leave to
the red men. (142-3)

From this point in the novel, the parallels with Dorothy Hoobler's
The Trail on Which They Wept
are all
too clear, and the pairing of texts (see Figures 1 and 2) provides
the basis for a rich thematic unit about the treatment of Native
Americans in the century during which the United States was
settled.

Barrie and Daughter (1943)

Caudill had learned from her father, who was a teacher, "What
you carry in your head, nobody can take from you" (
My Appalachia,
28
) and the theme of education
dominates
Barrie and Daughter
and
Susan Cornish.
Barrie
and Daughter
was Caudill's first novel. The book, set in
the early twentieth century, highlights more of the Appalachia
Caudill experienced in her childhood. Caudill's father, like Peter
Barrie in the novel, was a Democrat in eastern Kentucky, which like
most of the Appalachian sections of the Southern states was
overwhelmingly Republican. Caudill saw her mother's tears and
distress on Election Day, a day Caudill describes "of drinking,
quarreling, shooting, feuding, and generally disturbing the peace"
(
My Appalachia 2
). In
Barrie and Daughter
the Election Day scene causes
Blanche, Peter's wife, even more agony than it brought Caudill's
mother, since in the novel Peter Barrie has not only taken an
unpopular political position, he has challenged the Scollard
brothers' lack of moral integrity.

Peter, and his daughter Fern, who are described by Blanche as
being gifted with the sense to "distinguish clearly and quickly
between what they considered right and wrong, and never to allow
the sun to go down on action undecided" (
Barrie and Daughter
41
) decide to open a
store, despite the fact that the Scollard brothers operate the only
other store in the valley, and the Scollards live adjacent to the
Barries. It is Peter's driving sense of justice and integrity
though, that causes him to open a store where the people of the
valley will not be cheated. Fern eagerly wants to become her
father's partner in the store. Peter has shared his idealistic plan
with Fern and counsels her:

"A good store not only furnishes people with what they
need. It can make them want better things than they have. It can
help them live more comfortably than they do live. It can give them
more satisfying things to work with, and prettier things to look at
while they work. If it does that for people without robbing them,
then you're right--it is a thing big enough to spend your life
doing."
(
Barrie and Daughter
44
)

The key sentiments in Peter's counsel are the goals of the good
store helping people live more comfortably than they do, and giving
people more satisfying things with which to work. Clearly too,
there is the aesthetic component: "prettier things to look at while
they work"; each of these goals addresses the needs of the
community and through another venue, offers hospitality.

Throughout the novel, Fern faces ridicule for being a woman and
a storekeeper. In the face of mountain politics she's told by her
future fiance, Clint Stacey, "Politics in these mountains is
stronger than any passel of facts you can quote to people. And
you've got to be ready for lean and dangerous times when people get
busy at their politics and just naturally don't know and don't care
if their smokehouses are full or empty" (
Barrie and Daughter
112
). At the same time,
Clint remains her staunch supporter since he too, wants to do
something less than typical in his mountain community. When he
shares with Fern his dreams of becoming a doctor he emphasizes,
"But it takes a lot of courage, Fern, doesn't it, to do a thing
everybody say you can't do, or that just a waste of time to do?"
(
Barrie and Daughter
228
). Clint's
plans to be a doctor have grown specifically from his experience in
the mountain community where homegrown remedies have dominated
medical treatment. With no disparagement to the natural wisdom of
the mountain people, Clint knows that the white swelling Fern's
brother Tom had in his leg when he was four, could have been
treated differently. If it had, Tom, age fifteen at the novel's
opening, would not need to face all of life hampered by
crutches.

Barrie and Daughter
delves deeply
into the moral fiber, that honesty and drive to live by principle,
that the best of mountain cultures nourishes despite the prevalence
of violence. The Scollards, primarily driven by the greed and
corruption of John Scollard, attempt a series of sabotages of the
Barries' attempt to provide a store that fosters honest trade.
Again Peter's wisdom provides both shield and goad for Fern's
courageous actions. Peter says in the face of John Scollard's
violent action, "That ain't according to our way. But we won't run
from them either. There are some things a knife can't cut" (
Barrie and Daughter
51
).

In her decision to join her father's venture and to persevere in
the face of the demoralizing actions of the Scollards, Fern emerges
as a courageous and ethical woman. Her father reflects, "She was
going to be something far more splendid than the mere keeper of the
storehouseÉfar grander than a mere trader in food and
clothing and shelter. She was going to be a mighty fighter on the
side of the people" (
Barrie and Daughter
52
).

Peter's wife, Blanche, a quieter figure in the novel, is a
champion of education, one of the qualities of mountain culture
which Caudill weaves throughout each novel: "'I'd as soon a child
of mine would be dishonest as to grow up without book learning'"
(
Barrie and Daughter
94
). This
conviction Blanche shares with her husband and with those who seek
the best in mountain culture. Peter's strong moral convictions are
likewise grounded in education. The Democrat Peter wishes to
support in the elections has not been entirely fair and honest in
the means he has chosen to right a wrong. In this dilemma, Peter
responds:

"And I don't care how bad a thing need correcting if
you can't come out and correct it in the open, then the medicine's
just as poisonous as the disease. It takes education, daughter, to
change a thing. Education. And education's a slow thing. But it's
an honest thing, and when it gains ground with a point it's trying
to make, it can just about hold that ground against anybody"
(
Barrie and Daughter
233
).

Susan Cornish (1955)

Susan Cornish
is Caudill's novel
whose main conflict arises from the issue of education. The novel
presents Caudill's strongest challenge to the moral and economic
torpor affecting the people of Pickwick Mill, a community easily
identifiable as representative of the broader Appalachian region.
Susan, the novel's protagonist, has chosen, in her junior year, not
to return to the college her parents have selected; the college's
narrow perspective on learning cannot satisfy her far-reaching
questions.

"Can't you see what I'm talking about, Daddy?...I wish
I could make you understand that--that something inside me is
always asking questions and driving me to find answers. I can't
help it if they're hard questions, or if they're questions you're
ashamed to ask. Like, 'What is God?' and, 'Are all men really
created equal?' and, "Is white a superior color to black?' The
thing that matters is that they're honest questions. But nobody has
ever faced my questions with me squarely."
(
Susan Cornish
13
)

Her refusal to return to college precipitates her need for a job,
and at eighteen, Susan obtains a teaching position, deciding "to
find out if a teacher could be to a child what she had wanted her
teachers to be to her" (
Susan Cornish
15
).

Her challenges in Pickwick Mill are monumental: the land is
eroded; wealthy landowners like Sam Goad, who has given Susan her
position, can remove their tenant farmers at whim and pay their
poll tax so the tenants vote as the "boss" wants; families are
dissatisfied with the school and are unmotivated to do anything for
its improvement. Susan is told: "The old settlers did work together
and play together. But together they wasted the wonderful loamy
flesh of this elbow of land right down to the rocky bone. They
bequeathed a lot of gully-washed farms to their children, and
gully-washed farms won't nourish a community" (
Susan Cornish
57
).

Added to these harsh realities, Susan learns quickly "that the
essence of good teaching was more than prodding children through
textbooks. It was guiding and companioning children in the realms
into which their textbooks led. Teaching was more than knowing the
answers. It was being the answers, deep within herself, to all the
questions..." (
Susan Cornish
21
).

County Superintendent Lawrence McAdam recognizes in Susan the
honest searching, tireless drive, and integrity that will make up
for any inadequacies. He, and several other supporters, provide the
backdrop for her idealism. Even when Susan feels as the speaker in
Milton's "Lycidas" that "the hungry sheep look up and are not fed,"
she is able to awaken a new kind of energy in the community.
Caudill creates in the novel as she has in the other young adult
novels, fictional characters who clearly achieve the answers to
each of the three major problems dominating post-l940's Appalachia:
economic, lack of education and lack of community responsibility.
As the school at Pickwick Mill is rejuvenated, the community
reunites in the "coming together of people who had long gone their
separate ways" (
Susan Cornish
101
).

The novel identifies the roots of that which can most erode the
ideals in mountain communities. Susan examines the roots in a
conversation with Superintendent McAdam:

"I want to go beyond teaching my children how to read
and spell and multiply...I know these skills are necessary tools.
But as far as I have been able to work things out, the chief
business of teaching, after helping children learn is to-is to sick
them on some deep yearning-the way you train a hound and then sick
him on a fox. Maybe, Mr. McAdam, I'm just an ignorant girl playing
around with impossibly big ideas, but I do have a goal. I want
these children to make over Pickwick Mill into a living community,
a place alive with vigor and hope, where people work together and
play together and worship together they way they did in the old
days."
(
Susan Cornish
56-7
)

Susan's efforts to renew the community are slow and frequently
thwarted; her experience in facing the blight that saps the
community is not a new one nor is it unique to mid-twentieth
century. She is told "The physical and spiritual erosion in
Pickwick Mill didn't take place overnight, and overnight you aren't
going to rebuild what has been wasted" (
Susan
Cornish
59
). Caudill has created a story of a woman who
does assume the challenge; the novel reveals a cast of characters
true to mountain life and equally true to the spirit of renewal
that can triumph over torpor.

None of these brief analyses can do justice to the wealth of
Rebecca Caudill's contributions to authentic voicing of Appalachian
culture. In addition to the creation of characters and conflicts so
true to Appalachia, Caudill uses the mountain variety of English,
the foods, activities, and elements of nature native to Appalachia
for her comprehensive expose of this region. Her writings serve the
mountain people well, but her works also capitalize on the
universals in human experience, thus appealing to contemporary
audiences from regions well beyond Appalachia. Her character of
Lawrence McAdam, the county superintendent in
Susan Cornish
identifies the human characteristics that
apply to any region in any age.

"Honesty and truth and the other living essentials get
so shoved around in this world, so mixed with mean little sordid
little half-truths and with sheer triviality. Truth is so
prostituted in most of our lives." (61)

It is another character though from Susan Cornish, Frank Burch, who
indicates why the best of any region or people will ultimately
triumph. And here we understand why the works of Caudill need to be
rediscovered. As Burch puts it, "By speaking the truth in
love...There isn't any meanness in the world that can stand up
against the truth spoken in love" (180)

2. "The soldiers are already here. They have guns, and we do
not. They are many, and we are few. Let me tell you what they have
already done to clear one of our towns. They rounded up all the
children and put them into camps. Their parents had to follow, or
they would never see their children again" (18-19).

3."Our children are our future...We cannot risk their lives. We
cannot keep the Americans from taking our land..." (19).

4. "The soldiers forced everyone into the stockades--mothers
with newborn babies, sick people, old men and women who could
barely walk. No one was allowed to stay behind" (29).

5. Grandmother, Tsaluh's wisdom figure, refuses to go the whole
journey: "You will take my spirit with you. But I will never go
where the sun dies" (38).

6."The Cherokee did not punish their children. They expected
them to learn by watching what the adults did. If a child did
something wrong, she would have to find it out for herself
(46).

1. Ketty's description on her niece Lennie as a poet prompts
this definition: "A poet is somebody who can see things ordinary
mortals can't see" (45).

2."People are always trying to find some far-off land--leaving
behind the fields they've tended and the friends they love and
crossing ocean seas and climbing high mountains to get to it. How
are we to know when we get to the French Lick if it's the far-off
land we're looking for?" (53)

3. Ketty and Anson in discussion about the Indians: "'All of
Salem met up with Indians many time,' Ketty said. 'Whenever Indians
came to Salem they were treated like human beings. If they were
hungry, they were given a warm place to sleep in the hayloft, since
that was more to their liking than a proper bed. And the next day
they went on their way'" (57).

4. "What else is waitin' but not knowin'?" (103, Tish's
words)

5. Tish to Lettice, who has just had her baby drown and now
Lettice says she wants to die: "Life ain't a purty to throw away
when you get tired of hit. Even when life's a burden, you don't
throw hit away. You hold on to hit, hard" (214).

6. "But the wilderness kept a stern school. In it a body learned
quick enough what comes first and what waits" (279).

Hoobler, Dorothy and Thomas.
The Trail
on Which They Wept: The Story of a Cherokee Girl.
Morristown,
NJ: Silver Burdett Press, l992.

Mary Warner is a professor of English at Western Carolina
University, Cullowee, North Carolina.

Copyright 1999. The Assembly on Literature for
Adolescents of the National Council of Teachers of English (ISSN
#0882-2840). Permission is given to copy any article provided
credit is given and the copies are not intended for resale in any
form.